


Other Fragments

by bomberqueen17



Series: Other Plans [3]
Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: DVD Extras, fragments, offcuts
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-05-01
Updated: 2014-07-05
Packaged: 2018-01-21 12:35:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,809
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1550711
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bomberqueen17/pseuds/bomberqueen17
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is a home for some of the bits I've written that fit into the universe of Other Plans, but not into the storyline. So far it's just a few offcuts and some things I couldn't shoehorn in anywhere else. Some of these bits are quite old and some are new.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Midnight Snack

It was close to two in the morning and John was sitting at the kitchen island methodically stripping a chicken carcass and shoving it into his face when his father came home. 

It took him a few minutes of  processing the sounds— car in the driveway, door shutting, alarm system being keyed— and he’d just figured out what was going on when his father stepped into the kitchen, looking tired and rumpled, still in a suit with the tie loosened. 

“Oh,” Patrick said, “it’s you, Johnny. What are you doing up?”

John slipped from his chair and stood, grabbing the rumpled paper towel he’d been occasionally cleaning his fingers on. He swallowed hard. “Woke up hungry, Dad.”

Patrick frowned and came closer, and John schooled his face to neutral, posture to neutral, hands, well, crap, twisted in the greasy napkin, best he could do. Inspiration struck suddenly. 

“Susan left your dinner in the fridge,” he said. “I’ll reheat it for you, if you like.”

Patrick blinked at that, the frown dissipating. “We could eat together,” he said, raising his eyebrows.

“If you didn’t eat, you shouldn’t go to bed on an empty stomach,” John said, going to the refrigerator and pulling out the plate with its matching cover. Susan often left Patrick a plate in the fridge. John often ate its contents the next morning.  

“Is that the mistake you made?” Patrick asked, pulling out one of the chairs from the table. 

“No,” John said a little ruefully, “I ate. I ate when I got home from school, then I ate dinner, then I ate another helping a couple hours after dinner, then I ate again right before bed, and then I woke up a little bit ago feeling like none of that had even mattered.” 

“How tall are you now?” Patrick asked. 

John didn’t shrug, Patrick hated that, but he paused and thought it over. “I don’t know,” he said, “but I outgrew all of my shoes over a weekend last month and Susan says she’s buying everything too big for a while.” He was barefoot, and his pyjama pants stopped two inches above his ankle bones. “At Christmas I could step on the hems of these.”

“Hm,” Patrick said, and John stood by the microwave, daring to cast a glance over at him. Patrick had his jaw cradled in a hand, elbow propped on the kitchen island, looking thoughtful. “Guess you’re not going to be a little squirt after all. I’d thought you might take after my brother but I guess not.”

It wasn’t praise but it wasn’t unpleasant either, by its tone. John got a fork and knife out of the drawer and pulled the dish out of the microwave when it beeped. He slid it onto the table in front of his father, got a paper towel and put the silverware on it, and said, “Did you want a drink? There’s whole milk, or juice, or I think a couple of bottles of beer.”

“Oh,” Patrick said, “a beer would be great.” 

John got one out, found the bottle opener, uncapped it, and set it down. “I’ll get a glass,” he said.

“No,” Patrick said, “don’t bother, the bottle’s fine. Go back to your midnight snack.”

John stood a moment, then got himself a fresh paper towel and slid warily into the seat he’d vacated. Patrick uncovered the plate and began eating. “Did you have a late meeting?” he asked politely, to fill the silence. 

“Sort of,” Patrick said, chewing thoughtfully. “We’re acquiring another, smaller company. They have a very good market share and some great assets, but the company is in terrible shape apart from that. The old owners are trying to impose all kinds of conditions on the sale, which it would be nonsensical for us to adhere to— we might as well not even buy the company at that point, they’d drag us down instead of helping us like I want them to. So I made them sit, all of them, and our team, and our lawyers and their lawyers and everyone, and said nobody could leave until we were done. And so now, we’re done.”

John raised his eyebrows and nodded approvingly. “Did you get what you wanted?”

Patrick smiled. “In the end, I almost always get what I want,” he said, but his eyes lingered thoughtfully on John, his hands, his shoulders, and John tried to figure out if the expression was really approving or if it was a trick of the light. 

 


	2. Horse Show

 

Greta wound her arm though John’s as they watched Jimmy Turner and his big blood bay thundering into the final stretch. Four more obstacles, and they were behind John’s time by a bare quarter second. John never put up with anyone touching him, but he was now, absently digging his fingers into her forearm, barely breathing, eyes locked on the horse and rider. 

“If he takes the long way, he’ll never make up the time,” Greta murmured. 

“He won’t,” John said, “but,” and he didn’t finish the sentence.

True to John’s prediction, Jimmy hauled his mount around the tighter turn to take the shorter route, more technically challenging but faster. John’s fingers tightened enough to bruise her, and then— 

Jimmy’s mount couldn’t get the height on the shorter approach, and the top bar of the jump came down.

Greta shouted and pumped her fist in the air. That was it— a fault, and there was no possible way Jimmy could make it up. John would hold the lead, and first place. 

John let go of her arm and stood, motionless and shocked, watching Jimmy hang on grimly and finish the last obstacle, disappointment in every line of his narrow shoulders. He’d knocked himself down to third, by that, and somewhere Miranda Davies was jumping up and down in unbridled joy at her second-place finish, better than she’d hoped for after last season’s injury. 

“You did it,” Greta said. “John! You did it!”

“I did it,” John said faintly, then turned to her, and his thin solemn face was lit up with shocked joy, a slow wide grin spreading across it. “Greta! We— we did it!” 

“Oh, my beautiful boy,” she said, and wrapped her arms around him, squeezing him until he laughed. He wasn’t a hugger, not anymore, but he let her now, hands tangling in the fabric of her jacket. She remembered herself and let him go after a moment, but smacked a delighted kiss onto his forehead. “You did it, John, I _knew_ you could.”

“Wait, does that mean he won?” Greta had completely forgotten Patrick Sheppard was there, in the excitement. He never came to these things, but he had this time, and it was perfect timing, perfect pressure to force an incredible performance out of John. 

“It does,” Greta said, grinning fit to split her face. “Jimmy was the only one who had a chance of besting John’s score, and he didn’t.” 

Patrick looked at John, and Greta thought, so proud she might burst, _here, here is your son, here is your_ perfect _son_. She’d seen how thoroughly John was not the favorite, but here, she thought a little fiercely, here was incontrovertible evidence, at last. He was better than anyone else in the circuit, he was better than any other student she’d ever trained, he was a champion, he was a hard worker, he was brave and talented and a superb horseman, and here at last was the proof of it, so glaring and obvious even Patrick would have to see it. 

John was smiling, bright and heartbreakingly beautiful in his teenagerish way, and she’d never seen him look at his father with anything other than reserved caution. But in that moment, he shone with joy and something very like hope.

“But he didn’t have a perfect round,” Patrick said, looking confused. 

“He was the closest to it of anybody,” Greta said. The scoring of these things wasn’t rocket science, and she knew Patrick wasn’t a stupid man. “That’s how it works. There’s no upper limit to how many points you can get, you just have to get the most.”

“It seems to me like the course should be designed a little better than that,” Patrick said, frowning. 

Greta shook her head. “That’s not how it works,” she said. “That’s not how most sports work. There’s no perfect score in racing. There’s no perfect score in basketball. You just have to go faster, or get more points, or in this case, both.”

“But he made mistakes in the show jumping,” Patrick said. 

“Everyone did,” Greta said, and her chest tightened, because the light had gone out of John’s face and he was looking crushed and small and polite, smiling blankly and not quite looking at his father. 

“It just doesn’t seem right,” Patrick said, shaking his head, “that you can win without being perfect.”


	3. I Like This Show

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Joey as a colicky baby. Inspired by recent babysitting adventures.

John eased the door shut behind him and stood, barefoot, in the garage. Joey’s screams echoed in the rafters of the ceilingless space. “That’s not really any better,” he said, mostly to himself, and picked his way carefully across the cold concrete floor to open the door into the back yard. He followed the freezing-cold concrete of the walkway and looked up at the cloudy sky, Joey still screaming against his shoulder. 

“Baby,” he murmured, “baby boy, please.”

He paced up and down the concrete walkway until his toes were numb, until his ankles ached with the cold. Joey showed no signs of letting up, no signs of quieting down. John bounced him gently, rocked side to side, kissed his head. He knew the poor tiny thing had an upset stomach and it wasn’t his fault he was so furious, but it was four in the morning and John was desperate, desperate to sleep. Nancy had started off with Joey, walking with him for two hours until she was crying too. John had sent her to bed and taken over, then, and he’d tried every trick he knew, every trick every elderly female relative had passed on to him, every suggestion the doctor had given. He’d called their health insurance company’s help line after three hours of it, and they’d said there was really nothing else to do, had they tried baby Tylenol, oh they had? Oh. Well. 

John couldn’t feel his feet and was in danger of tripping himself, so he went back into the garage, cringing at the echo. In a flash of inspiration he got into his car and sat in the front passenger’s seat holding Joey to his chest, tucking his feet up under his bent legs to try and get some warmth back into them. In the tiny space of the car, the screaming was louder but muffled. 

“Baby,” John said, near tears himself, “please, I can’t make it better.” He let Joey down to lie in his lap and gazed down into his face. Joey paused a moment, looked up at him, scrunched up his face, and let go with an even louder wail. “I’m sorry,” John said helplessly. “I’m really sorry, buddy. I can’t fix it.” 

He tried singing, though he didn’t have much of a voice. Usually it at least got a reaction, but he might as well have not been doing anything for all the distraction it provided. Earlier they’d gone through every toy Joey owned, everything in the house that could make a noise, everything that blinked or flashed or clicked or buzzed, everything. John unwrapped the blanket around Joey and took his little feet and made them dance, did some bicycle kicks in another futile attempt to help move any trapped gas in his intestines, counted Joey’s toes for him, made up songs that mostly consisted of the words _please_ and _stop screaming_ and _for the love of god_ and _I’ll do anything_ and _sleep_. 

Joey’s cries got a little quieter for a while, but it wasn’t because he was comforted, it was because he was tired. John crooned nonsense at his sad little scrunched-up red angry face, and Joey whimpered and sobbed and squalled. Eventually John’s arms got tired so he nestled Joey up against his shoulder again, leaning the seat back. Joey screamed right in his ear for a moment, but quieted back down to whimpers again. 

“I’m sorry, baby,” John said a couple more times. His own eyelids were getting pretty heavy, his limbs leaden and liquid, melting into the car seat until he couldn’t raise them. He was a bit floaty, exhausted and drifting. Eventually there was silence, and dark, and oblivion.

 

It was light when he woke up, and he woke very stiff, sore, freezing cold except for his chest and shoulder, and utterly disoriented. The only thing that kept him from jerking upright was that his subconscious recognized the quiet snuffly breathing of a sleeping infant in his ear before he regained enough consciousness to move. 

He was in the car, with no shoes on, in his pajamas and a hoodie, with Joey wrapped in the throw quilt from the couch, and the seat reclined. And Joey was fast asleep, tiny body utterly limp and relaxed and _quiet_. Blessedly, blessedly quiet. 

John eased the car seat back toward vertical, and checked the dashboard clock. It was after seven. He’d slept nearly three hours like this. Which was the longest he’d slept at a stretch in the better part of a week. He might never walk normally again, he might have lost toes to frostbite, but he’d take it. 

Moving with more care than if he’d been handling explosives, John eased the car door open, got to his feet as slow and steady as a Tai Chi master, and made his way, weaving slightly, to the garage door. He let himself back into the house and leaned against the door a moment, blank with exhaustion. But Joey was asleep. Thank God, thank whatever, Joey was asleep. 

He blinked a couple times as his eyes tried to communicate something to his brain, and finally the synapses connected. Nancy was standing in the opposite doorway, looking tired and frazzled and puffy-eyed in a pair of his old PT sweats, giant on her, and a stained nursing tanktop that left very little of her astonishingly-changed breast acreage to the imagination. 

“I couldn’t find you,” she said quietly. “I looked all over the house and thought I was going crazy or something.”

“Oh,” John said. He blinked a couple more times, trying to remember how words worked. “I figured I should try to let you sleep.”

“I found you eventually,” she said, and quirked a tired half-smile at him. “I took a picture. I’ve already emailed it to my mother, it’s too late to make me delete it.”

“Jesus,” John said. “I must look like a lunatic.”

“You kinda do right now,” she said, looking him up and down. 

He looked her up and down. “You look…” He trailed off. “Kinda good, actually.” She did; her hair was clean and damp, braided, and her body was settling into less-distorted and more familiar curves, and her eyes were brighter with amusement than they had been of late. She must have gotten some solid sleep.

“Liar,” she said, but she must have noticed that he was too tired to lie, because she gave him a sweet little smile and came closer, reaching up to run her fingers through his hair. 

“No,” he said, leaning in to her hand. “You’re pretty.”

“Go on,” she said, giving him one of those mischievous sparkling smiles. 

“Also you are very talented,” John said. “Even though our tiny spawn is possessed by Satan, the fact remains that you made him out of your own body, an entire new organism, and pushed him out through your incredibly talented vagina. The Satan possession apparently came later.”

Nancy snorted. “You are a ridiculous human being,” she said. “Think you can hand the Satan-possessed spawn to me without waking him up?”

“Not willin’ to risk it,” John said, and collected himself enough to push himself off the door and stagger into the living room. He eased down onto the couch. Joey didn’t stir. His drool had soaked John’s sweatshirt in one spot, right through his t-shirt, but John wasn’t going to move him. 

“Coffee?” she asked. 

“Sure,” he said, staring blankly at the TV, which was off. She came over with a cup and he said, “This is my favorite show.”

She laughed at him, and ruffled his hair, and he fell asleep before he drank any of the coffee anyway.


	4. Television Footage

“Up next,” the attractive dark-haired news anchor lady said, “a convenience store robber gets more than he bargained for when he tangles with a Special Forces veteran.” The screen behind her showed a shot of a bloody handprint smudged across the glass of a beverage cooler. 

“Fuck,” John muttered, rubbing his face. 

The program cut back in, commercials obviously deleted. “Eighteen-year-old Michael Taylor was hard-up for money, so he stole a .38 caliber revolver and went into a Wilson Farms at 4:30 on a Saturday morning, hoping to make off with the contents of the register,” a male voice said over an establishing shot of the store’s sign, the streetscape, the parking lot.

The cashier appeared, looking sort of excited at the attention, and said, Indian accent thicker than normal, “He had gun in his pocket, you know, I could see the shape of it, you know? And he pointed it at me and told me to empty the drawer.”

“Were you frightened?” a different male voice asked. 

“I was terrified,” the cashier said, eyes wide, sort of grinning. Well, you didn’t work the night shift if you were good with people, John reflected.  

“But unbeknownst to the robber, the convenience store was directly down the street from the largest police station in the area,” the voiceover man said, over a shot of John’s station by daylight, parked solid with police cruisers. “And one of the policemen who had just gotten off-shift was in the store trying to buy a newspaper.”

Sure enough, the screen filled with John’s departmental headshot. He hated the photo, he looked sort of like he was trying to swallow a frog. His name appeared at the bottom of the screen, for a wonder spelled correctly. 

“John Sheppard has been with the police force for only a couple of years,” the voiceover man said. “But prior to that, he served ten years in the Air Force, and rounded out his career with a stint in the Special Forces.” The photo changed, from his departmental headshot to an old picture of him, a formal Air Force portrait taken way back when he was a captain. God, his neck had been skinny. And the regulation haircut was downright embarrassing.

“He had high qualifications in marksmanship, was an accomplished pilot with nearly a thousand hours of flight time, and had a distinguished service record that included multiple forays behind enemy lines, and many citations for coolness under fire.”

“He sent me a text message,” Rachel said, appearing suddenly on screen in her full uniform, broad daylight, freshly applied lipgloss. “He was in the back, I think, by the newspaper racks, so the kid didn’t see him when he came in. So he texted me, he knew I was just starting my shift so I’d have my phone, and then he called me and set his phone down on the floor. So I could hear what was going on when the kid discovered him and told him to come out.” 

“Officer Rachel Emsworth has been friends with John Sheppard since he joined the force,” the voiceover guy said. 

“I rallied the troops,” Rachel said, “and we were there in probably two minutes.”

“But things didn’t go smoothly,” the voiceover man said, and the camera panned across a dramatic set of blood splatters in the snowy parking lot.

“We yelled at the kid to drop his weapon, but he pulled the trigger instead, and shot John,” Rachel said. “Right in the abdomen, knocked him back into the glass.” She shook her head. “I thought he was done for.” The camera panned down the aisle of the store, showing a pretty impressive smeared pool of blood. John grimaced. 

“Is that all his blood?” an off-camera voice asked. 

“Oh yeah,” Rachel said. 

“He wasn’t wearing a bulletproof vest?” the voice asked. 

Rachel shook her head. “He wasn’t in uniform,” she said. “He was wearing jeans and a parka, I think.”

“The would-be robber decided his only course of action would be to take the wounded Officer Sheppard hostage, and flee the scene,” the voiceover man said. “This dramatic footage was taken by an amateur videographer who was shooting a documentary in the area at the time.” 

The footage was dark and a little blurry, but resolved into the kid dragging John out the door of the convenience store. “Sheppard was badly injured,” the voiceover man said, “but this seems not to have fazed him much. Like many police officers, he often carries a concealed pistol even when off-duty.” 

Just then, on-screen, John audibly said “Are you [beep]ing kidding me?” God, his voice was nasal.

The kid snarled at him to shut up, higher-pitched in the recording than he’d sounded in real life, and manhandled John over to the car. “Watch what happens now,” the voiceover man said as they reached the car. 

The footage went into grainy slow-motion as the kid reached his gun hand down to the door handle and John abruptly dropped to his knee, twisted, drew his pistol, and pressed it up to the back of the kid’s head. Okay, John had to admit that it looked pretty bad-ass in slow motion, especially since the convenience store’s bright outdoor lighting caught the blood that spattered as he spun in a visible arc of droplets. It was grainy, but you could tell what it was. 

It went back to normal speed in time for John to shout “I said _drop it_.”

“If he had a gun that whole time, why didn’t he shoot the guy before he shot him?” the off-screen voice guy asked, though the footage kept playing, Yager slamming the kid against the car hood, John staggering back. 

“If you’re gonna shoot somebody,” Rachel said in voiceover, “you gotta be prepared to kill ‘em. The perp was only a teenager. I bet you anything John just didn’t want to kill a kid, not even a kid with a gun.”

On-screen, John shakily re-holstered his pistol, staggered sideways, and fell into the snowbank. 

“Officer Sheppard was listed in stable condition at the hospital at the time this segment was completed,” Voiceover guy said. The camera panned across the parking lot, in daylight this time. “He is expected to recover. The shooter is in custody.” 

 

 

 


End file.
